What the Holocaust Meant in the Thinking of Primo Levi and Jean Améry

...He who has suffered torture can no longer feel at ease in the world...

...Levi described Amery as "a lonely cantankerous philosopher" whose passionate anger made it impossible for him to adjust to life after the concentration camp...

...Strongly influenced by German phenomenology and French existentialism, Amery analyzes the internal workings of the self when placed under the extreme pressures of persecution, exile, torture, and imprisonment...

...To what extent are the German people collectively responsible for the genocide...

...Torture, Amery understood, has profound philosophical implications: the body is normally the boundary that separates the self 364 • DISSENT What the Holocaust Meant from the world, and with torture that boundary is violated...

...EDS . After reading At the Mind's Limits, first published in 1966, Primo Levi felt compelled to write its author, Jean Amery...

...most frequently, they trickled away in a feeling of complete indifference...

...In two decades of contemplating what happened to me, I believe to have recognized that a forgiving and forgetting induced by social pressure is immoral," he wrote...

...At another point, Amery describes seeking out the same kind of intellectual companionship Levi had found in the French inmate to whom he had recited Dante...

...While the rest of the world moved on to other problems and the Holocaust receded into the background, Amery continued to feel his wounds as freshly in 1964 as he did in 1944...

...Not only had Amery's education proved of no practical use in the camp, but spiritually, he felt it had failed him utterly...

...But after beginning to reflect on his past, Amery did not finish until he had written At the Mind's Limits...

...In the decisive moments their political or religious beliefs were of inestimable help to them, while we skeptical and humanistic intellectuals took recourse, in vain, to our literary, philosophical, and artistic household gods," Amery wrote...

...How much home does one need...

...I had grasped well that there are situations in life in which our body is our entire self and our entire fate...

...366 • DISSENT...

...The poem no longer transcended reality...

...Indeed, in a lecture he gave in 1977, the year before his death, Améry made a passionate defense of the Enlightenment that is remarkably close in spirit to Primo Levi: "And still I profess loyalty to Enlightenment...

...In At the Mind's Limits, Am6ry recalled the day in Vienna when he first read the Nuremberg Laws and understood that his life had changed irrevocably: I do not believe that I am inadmissibly projecting Auschwitz and the Final Solution back to 1935 when I advance these thoughts today . . . that in that year, at that moment when I read the Laws, I did indeed already hear the death threat—better, the death sentence...

...I was my body and nothing else: in hunger, in the blow that I suffered, in the blow that I dealt...

...What happened, happened...

...Pious Jews and Christians, as well as orthodox communists, drew strength from their faith but the cogitations of the skeptical intellectual only further weakened his resistance...

...Where the word T was to be avoided completely, it proved to be the single useful starting point," he explained...

...Amery tells of an extraordinary incident that occurred in Belgium during the German occupation...

...Had I too seen the world collapse upon me, had I been sentenced to exile and the loss of national identity, had I too been tortured until I fainted and lost consciousness and beyond, perhaps I would have learned to return the blow and to harbor like Amery those `resentments' to which he dedicated a long, anguish-filled essay...

...As Amery observes, "his spiritual and esthetic heritage had passed over into the uncontested and uncontestable ownership of the enemy...

...All but the most heinous war criminals were left unpunished or given mild sentences...

...Amery emerged from Auschwitz with nothing to go home to, while miraculously Levi's world was almost entirely intact...

...Indeed, he closes his last book with a sentence that closely echoes At the Mind's Limits: The great majority of Germans . . . accepted .. . out of mental laziness, myopic calculation, stupidity, and national pride the "beautiful words" of Corporal Hitler, followed him as long as luck and the lack of scruples favored him, were swept away by his ruin . . . and rehabilitated a few years later as the result of an unprincipled political game...

...When Levi committed suicide the following year, many readers and critics pointed to the chapter on Amery in The Drowned and the Saved as the interpretative key to understanding Levi's own death...

...While Maier grew up with a weak and confused sense of Jewish identity, the radical laws promulgated by Hitler in 1935 left no room for ambiguity: like it or not, by blood, Maier was a Jew and an enemy of the Third Reich...

...My human dignity lay in this punch to his jaw—and that it was in the end I, the physically much weaker man, who succumbed and was thrashed, meant nothing to me," Amery wrote...

...Like the vast majority of Italian Jews (85 percent), Levi's family survived, and he returned to live in the house where he had grown up, and where he, in turn, raised his own family...

...During his career as a writer, he wrote his books in the very room in which he had been born...

...Maier entered the Belgian resistance but was arrested in 1943...

...Levi found himself reaching some of the same stark conclusions Amery had arrived at twenty years earlier, while remaining in sharp disagreement with others...

...When Amery committed suicide in 1978, Levi was not surprised...

...What should the survivor do with his feelings of anger and resentment...

...The story of how Maier become Amery is the story of his life...

...In fact, when Levi shifted from autobiographical description to analysis in The Drowned and the Saved, his opinions are quite close to Amery's...

...Levi wrote that he would have given a day's ration to remember the rest of the verse...

...And yet, while admiring each other's work, the two had significant differences: Levi's books carried a message of hope, Amery sounded an unmistakable note of despair...

...Nonetheless, in 1986, when Levi wrote his last book on Auschwitz, The Drowned and the Saved, the figure of Amery loomed large in his mind...

...Both recount moments in which suddenly, in the horror of Auschwitz, they began to recite verses of poetry...

...As he began At the Mind's Limits, Amery was especially interested in Levi's Survival in Auschwitz because it treated a subject of particular interest to him: the intellectual at Auschwitz...

...I admire Amery's change of heart, his courageous decision to leave the ivory tower and go down onto the battlefield, but it was and is beyond my reach...

...My body when it tensed to strike was my physical and metaphysical dignity...

...Amery heard that a well-known French philosopher had arrived as a prisoner in the camp and, at considerable personal risk, sought the man out...

...But when Amery tried to engage him in conversation, the professor from the Sorbonne fell silent: "The man had not become insensitive, nor had I. He simply no longer believed in the reality of the SUMMER • 1990 • 363 What the Holocaust Meant world of the mind, and he rejected an intellectual word game that here no longer had any social relevance...

...The horsewhip lacerated me...

...However, what was framed as a series of philosophical essays turned, almost involuntarily, into an intensely personal, autobiographical work...

...In spite of all we have had to experience, I believe that even today, as in the days of the Encyclopedists, knowledge leads to recognition and recognition to morality...

...Underneath the measured tones of Levi's prose there is a tough-minded, unflinching realism, and beneath the harsh, bitter surface of Améry's writing is a desperate belief in sweet reason and dialogue...

...Amery avoided the subject of Auschwitz until 1964, when a German radio program asked him to give a lecture on his experiences...

...But soon, in 1940, German troops joined him there...

...The generation of the destroyers—the gas chamber constructors, those ready at any time to sign their name to anything, the generals duty-bound to their Fiihrer—is growing old with honor," Am6ry wrote...

...Amery's suicide in Salzburg in 1978, like other suicides, admits of a cloud of explanations, but, in hindsight, that episode of defying the Pole offers one explanation...

...The result for Amery was a loss of trust in the world on which we all implicitly depend...

...It became for him the starting point of knowledge, the irreducible substratum of reality on which to build...

...But that it happened cannot be so easily accepted...

...And I maintain that it was not the Enlightenment that failed . . . but rather those who were appointed its guardians...

...The SS man spoke the local dialect of the Austrian region where Amery himself had grown up, and Amery had to suppress a strong desire to greet his countryman in his native tongue— something that would have quickly betrayed his fake identity...

...Another critical factor in Amery's formation is his experience of torture, to which he dedicates a chapter in At the Mind's Limits...

...Restoring a link with the past, with the world outside the camp, lifted his morale...

...As a chemist, Levi could not help regarding the camp at Auschwitz as an enormous laboratory for one of history's most grotesque experiments...

...After watching Austria welcome German troops into Vienna, Maier fled illegally to Belgium...

...Speaking of the pain of survivors, Levi wrote: "The injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, rack not only the tormentors, but . . . the tormented...

...Among the passages of greatest pathos in this book are those dealing with the particular trauma of the German-Jewish intellectual whose pain at being rejected was directly proportional to the strength of his passion for German language, literature, music, and philosophy...

...Amery discusses the existential importance of an incident in which he punched a Polish prisoner who had hit him in the face...

...Faith in humanity—cracked by the first slap across the face, then demolished by torture—can never be recovered...

...Having read countless Holocaust memoirs, including Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, Amery was determined not to duplicate their work...

...How has history absorbed the experience of the Holocaust...

...Amery felt that his experiences had irreparably changed the moral universe...

...The picture of him," Amery writes, "did not show me a bearded Jewish sage, but rather a Tyrolean Imperial Rifleman in the uniform of the First World War...

...He asked that society be tolerant of his resentments and that "the German people . . . remain sensitive to the fact that they cannot allow a piece of their national history to be neutralized by time, but must integrate it...

...In the chapter "Resentments," Amery gives a moral justification to his feelings of resentment and anger, and the desire for revenge...

...Rather than trying to discard the memory of his pain, Amery held on to it and tried to use it as an internal compass in a morally distorted world...

...In a chilling passage that Primo Levi quoted on two different occasions, Amery wrote: "He who has been tortured remains tortured...

...He wore the gap in his teeth with pride, he writes, like a dueling scar...

...Améry was wrong to call Levi "the forgiver," for Levi expresses himself as strongly on the question of collective guilt as Amery ever did...

...It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the verses of Dante were a comforting reminder of home to Levi, while the lines of the German HOlderlin struck Amery's ears with a lonely, alien ring...

...Hearing the language of his childhood from the mouth of his potential assassin drove home to Amery with finality that he no longer had a home...

...Maier's father was Jewish but died fighting for his Kaiser before his son could get to know him...

...In his chapter on Amery in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi points to this passage as a possible clue to Amery's later suicide...

...He used his education to study and understand the people around him, and by insisting on seeing them as human beings and not as things, Levi believed he avoided the despair in which so many drowned...

...Inmates with manual skills—mechanics, tailors, masons, and carpenters—were particularly useful to the Germans...

...But nothing happened...

...In situations like mine, physical violence is the sole means for restoring a disjointed personality...

...Both writers agree that on a practical level the intellectual was a disadvantaged member of the camp community...

...To be a Jew, that meant for me, from this moment on, to be a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not where he properly belonged...

...This was true not only of the culture but of the German language itself...

...As a partisan Maier was tortured by the Gestapo and as a Jew he was sent to Auschwitz...

...I rebel against my past, against history and against a present that places the incomprehensible in the cold storage of history and thus falsifies it in a revolting way...

...It was this stance of defiance that both attracted and worried Primo Levi...

...they remain two very different writers...

...What may help to account for the radically different experiences of Levi and Amery is their differing national origins—something Amery himself points out...

...But nonetheless they are two of the best minds to explore the implications of what Levi has called "the central event, the scourge of our century...

...And finally, even his mastery and control of his body was violated through the experience of torture...

...This was not the case for Primo Levi...

...Suddenly, it became rude, inappropriate, and mean-spirited to dwell on the past, or to speak of German guilt or collective responsibility...

...Those who had profited and thrived under the Third Reich resumed, for the most part, places of power and respect...

...Despite the racial laws, Levi was allowed to finish his university degree, and he always attributed the fact that he graduated with highest honors in chemistry from the University of Turin to the fact that his professors wanted to quietly express their dissent from the racial persecutions...

...Although Italy had passed its own shameful version of the racial laws in 1938, Levi did not feel himself to be living in a hostile society...

...for that reason, even if I do not dare demand that the now defenseless thug be surrendered up to my own whip-swinging hand, I want at least the vile satisfaction of knowing that my enemy is behind bars...

...Following his liberation, Maier returned to Belgium and forged a new identity as Jean Amery, journalist and philosopher...

...Maier, while studying SUMMER • 1990 • 361 What the Holocaust Meant philosophy in Vienna, immediately opposed the rise of Nazism...

...One day, Amery and several friends in the resistance found themselves face to face with a member of the German SS who had come to their apartment to complain about the noise...

...Thus Amery felt increasingly out of tune with the world, a kind of living anachronism, carrying an untimely message...

...With Pantheon's kind permission, we print below Stille's essay...

...All of the norms and certainties on which he had been raised—family, friendship, homeland, philosophy, literature, language—were stripped one by one from him until he was nothing but a body...

...It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype, a trend against which I would like to erect a dike...

...In his last years, Levi, like Amery, was troubled by the widening distance between his own experience and the perceptions of the Holocaust in the world around him...

...Having had every moral certainty literally beaten out of him in the Gestapo torture chamber, Amery found his pain to be the only solid reality he could believe in...

...The gap exists and grows wider every year...

...Rather than seeking reconciliation with the German people, Amery preferred the state of uneasy truce...

...Painfully beaten, I was satisfied with myself...

...But the different twists these two episodes take help define the sensibility that separated them...

...At a certain moment, however, Levi's and Amery's experiences mirror one another to an astonishing degree...

...There is a common scientific spirit to both Levi's and Amery's writings...

...Amery noticed a flag waving atop a building as he trudged into camp after a day's labor and found himself muttering a favorite line from the German poet HOlderlin: " 'The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind.' Then I repeated the stanza somewhat louder, listened to the words' sound, tried to track the rhythm, and expected the emotional and mental response that for years this HOlderlin poem had awakened in me...

...The period of persecution took a much larger chunk of Amery's life than it did of Levi's: Amery lived the life of a hunted animal from the time of the German annexation of Austria in 1938 until his liberation in 1945, while Levi's period of actual imprisonment lasted little more than a year...

...While Levi wrote Survival in Auschwitz (originally published under the title If This Is a Man) in the euphoric flush following his liberation in 1945, Am6ry wrote At the Mind's Limits at a time when a certain fatigue and impatience had begun to surround the subject of the Holocaust...

...It was a book that struck many of its readers as one of the most thoughtful and abrasively honest reflections (to quote from Amery's subtitle) "by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities...

...Conversely, Levi found that the shreds of culture he was able to maintain through conversations with fellow inmates served to help preserve that minimum core of humanity necessary to sustain him through his imprisonment...

...Out of political and economic necessity, Germany had been quickly "normalized" and transformed almost overnight from enemy to ally...

...Amery is an anagram of the alternate form, Mayer...

...While he fully recognized that healing, forgetting, and letting go are natural processes, Amery fought against them as a violation of his own experience...

...Levi, however, with his chemistry background, was an exception to the rule...

...The culture that Amery turned to in his moment of need was the culture of Germany, the nation that had rejected him, declared him a nonperson, and chased him across Europe for the purpose of killing him...

...and Levi was deported by Germans, not Italians...

...soft-handed intellectuals were relegated to the most brutal and dangerous outdoor manual labor...

...Although a timid, introspective intellectual, Maier summoned the courage to challenge early Nazi organizers in Vienna and lost a tooth to a Nazi fist...

...We see it as a duty and, at the SUMMER • 1990 • 365 What the Holocaust Meant same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to...

...The fascist racial campaign was a purely opportunistic maneuver of Mussolini rather than the expression of popular will...

...The twenty-year silence is crucial to understanding the bitter tone of the book...

...The result is a hybrid literary form that Amery calls "a 362 • DISSENT What the Holocaust Meant personal confession refracted through meditation...

...But while Levi stuck closely to observable, external reality, Amery's subject of study is himself...

...Those who "trade blows" with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it because they are sure to be defeated...

...What does physical torture do to a person's sense of his own body and his place in the world...

...Maier's mother, of mixed Jewish and Christian descent, invoked the aid of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and celebrated Christmas...

...On a deeper level their experiences differed even more...

...Levi points out, however, that their differences are not as much differences of opinions as they are reflections of their respective experiences...

...Jean Amery was born in Vienna in 1912 with the name Hans Maier...

...Their differences crystallize in a passage of At the Mind's Limits on the question of violence and self-defense...

...Now, Pantheon Books has reissued At the Mind's Limits, with a foreword by Alexander Stille, which tells the story of Amery's tragic life and contrasts his views about the Holocaust with those of Primo Levi...

...Torture for Amery, Levi wrote, was "an interminable death...

...Italian Jews were not deported until the German army invaded Italy in September 1943...

...Amery somewhat sarcastically referred to Levi as "the forgiver...

...When he wrote about the camp years later, this same emphatic process became the secret of his art...

...It would be a mistake to draw too close a parallel between Amery and Levi simply because of their common fate...

...I admire it, but I must point out that this choice, protracted throughout his post-Auschwitz existence, led him to positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living...

...In most cases they brought no consolation, at times they appeared as pain or derision...

...For all their apparent differences, there is a profound affinity between the two...

...While Levi tries to keep his subjective reactions in check as he writes, those subjective feelings are precisely what Amery is interested in studying...

...Indeed, Amery is the intellectual angel with whom Levi wrestled as he struggled to clarify the ultimate meaning of the Holocaust after the passing of forty years...

...Levi had the comfort of a continuity that was impossible for Amery...

...He set out to answer a number of general questions: Was it an advantage to be an intellectual at Auschwitz...

...With the reissue of Amery's At the Mind's Limits we have the other half of one of the most interesting intellectual dialogues of our time...

...The two, after all, had so much in common: both were deeply cultivated, nonreligious Jews who had joined the antifascist resistance and been deported to Auschwitz, and both had written powerfully about their experiences...

...For Levi, this brief moment of communication, albeit in broken French, was a small triumph against the dehumanization of the camp...

...Levi recalled a day in which he tried to explain the poet Dante to a young French inmate and recited fragments from a canto of Inferno...

...For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult...

...As a philosopher, Amery wanted to take a more speculative approach...

...I have never known how to 'return the blow,' not out of evangelic saintliness or intellectual aristocracy, but due to an intrinsic incapacity," Levi wrote...